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Most major enterprise software vendors had a quiet 2017 on the M&A front, but SAP sat out longer than most. Now it's jumping back in with the $2.4bn acquisition of CallidusCloud, its first billion-dollar print in over three years.

Business-to-business buyers' journeys can be complex, demanding digital strategies similar to business-to-customer approaches to help the sales team execute in the digital era. New advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence show promise in augmenting the sales team with actionable insight and intelligent automation.

Private equity is doing a number on the public markets. No longer content with siphoning dozens of tech vendors off the exchanges each year, buyout shops are now moving earlier in the IPO process and targeting companies that may only be thinking about someday going public. These rapacious acquirers are not only harvesting the current crop of tech vendors on the NYSE and Nasdaq, but also snapping up the seeds for next season's planting as well.

Software for sales teams is moving beyond systems of record and into systems of engagement. As these capabilities become categories in their own right, CRM and sales enablement vendors are likely to want to gobble up some of them.

Startups developing sales-enablement software have been the targets of a recent spate of acquisitions after indulging in readily available venture capital for the burgeoning category. But the early deals appear modest and bigger exits still seem a ways out.

Two years after coming public, Xactly is headed private in a $564m buyout by Vista Equity Partners. The deal values shares of the sales compensation management vendor at nearly their highest-ever level, roughly twice the price at which Xactly sold them during its IPO. However, the valuation of the proposed take-private comes at a discount to a rival that has used an active M&A strategy to expand its portfolio.

The vendor has debuted a reporting package for its Salesforce-based response management offering. The product pulls data out of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and measures the response lifecycle of leads and contacts. It also lets marketers see responses by account.

Overall, tech M&A spending in the just-completed Q2 jumped 50% from the first three months of the year. That surge was led by robust dealmaking in June, which saw the highest monthly spending since last fall. However, virtually all of that spending (96%, to be exact) got done before the UK's fateful vote to leave the EU.

So much for the comeback of the tech IPO market. Although SecureWorks did manage to make it public, the managed security service provider had to trim both the size and price of its offering to get investors interested. To understand why, we look at what SecureWorks was actually selling, and how that's gone for investors in the recent past.